Trail's End Page 5

  CHAPTER V

  ASCALON AWAKE

  Ascalon was laid out according to the Spanish tradition for arrangingtowns that dominated the builders of the West and Southwest in the dayswhen Santa Fe extended its trade influence over a vast territory.Although Ascalon was only a stage station in the latter days of trafficover the Santa Fe Trail, its builders, when it came occasion to expand,were men who had traded in that capital of the gray desert wastes at thetrail's end, and nothing would serve them but a plaza, with thecourthouse in the middle of it, the principal business establishmentsfacing it the four sides around.

  There were many who called it _the plaza_ still, especially visitorsfrom along the Rio Grande who came driving their long-horned,lean-flanked cattle northward over the Chisholm Trail. Santa Fe, at itsworst, could not have been dustier than this town of Ascalon, andespecially the plaza, or public square, in these summer days. Gallopinghorses set its dust flying in obscuring clouds; the restless wind thatblew from sunrise till sunset day in and day out from the southwest,whipped it in sudden gusts of temper, and drove it through open doors,spreading it like a sun-defying hoarfrost on the low roofs. Allconsidered, Ascalon was as dry, uncomfortable, unpromising of romance,as any place that man ever built or nature ever harassed with wearingwind and warping sun.

  The courthouse in the middle of the public square was built of bricks,of that porous, fiery sort which seem so peculiarly designed to themonstrous vagaries of rural architecture. Here in Ascalon they fittedwell with the arid appearance of things, as a fiery face goes best withwhite eyebrows, anywhere.

  The courthouse was a two-storied structure, with the cupola asindispensable to the old-time Kansas courthouse as a steeple to achurch. The jail was in the basement of it, thus sparing culprits acertain punishment by concealing the building's raw, red, and crudelines from the eye. Not that anybody in jail or out of it ever thoughtof this advantage, or appreciated it, indeed, for Ascalon was proud ofthe courthouse, and fired with a desire and determination to keep itthere in the plaza forever and a day.

  There were precedents before them, and plenty of them in that part ofthe country, where county seats had been changed, courthouses of redbricks and gray stones put on skids and moved away, leaving desolationthat neither maledictions could assuage nor oratory could repair. Forprosperity went with the courthouse in those days, and dignity, andconsequence among the peoples of the earth.

  Hitching racks, like crude apparatus for athletic exercises, were builtaround the courthouse, with good driving distance between them and theplank sidewalks. Here the riders from distant ranges tied their jadedmounts, here such as made use of wagons in that land of horseback-goingmen hitched their teams when they drove in for supplies.

  There was not a shrub in the courthouse square, not the dead andstricken trunk of a tree standing monument of any attempt to mitigatethe curse of sun. There was not a blade of grass, not a struggling,wind-blown flower. Only here and there chickweed grew, spreading itsgreen tracery over the white soil in such sequestered spots as the hoofsof beast and the feet of men did not stamp and chafe and wear; and inthe angles of the courthouse walls, the Russian thistle, barbed with itsthousand thorns. Men did not consider beauty in Ascalon, this Tophet attrail's end, save it might be the beauty of human flesh, and then itmust be rouged and powdered, and enforced with every cosmetic mixture towin attention in an atmosphere where life was lived in a ferment of uglystrife.

  There was in Ascalon in those bloody days a standing coroner's jury, ofwhich Tom Conboy was the foreman, composed of certain gamblers and townpoliticians whose interests were with the vicious element. To these menthe wide notoriety of the town was capital. Therefore, it was seldom,indeed, that anybody was slain in Ascalon without justification,according to the findings of this coroner's jury. In this way thegamblers and divekeepers, and such respectable citizens as chose toexercise their hands in this exhilarating pastime, were regularlyabsolved.

  The result of this amicable agreement between the county officials andthe people of the town was that Ascalon became, more than ever, a refugefor the outlawed and proscribed of other communities. Every trainbrought them, and dumped them down on the station platform to find theirway like wolves to their kind into the activities of the town.

  Gamblers and gun-slingers, tricksters and sharpers, attended by thecarrion flock of women who always hover after these wreckers andwastrels, came to Ascalon by scores. It began to appear a question, intime, of what they were to subsist upon, even though they turned to theravening of one another.

  But the broad notoriety of Ascalon attended to this, bringing with theoutlawed and debased a fresh and eager train of victims. The sons offamilies came from afar, sated with the diversions and debaucheries ofeastern cities, looking for strange thrills and adventures to heat theirsurfeited blood. Unsophisticated young men came, following the lure ofromance; farm boys from the midwestern states came, with a thought ofpioneering and making a new empire of the plow, as their fathers hadsmoothed the land in the states already called old.

  All of these came with money in their pockets, and nearly all of them,one day first or last, became contributors to the support of Ascalon'sprostituted population. New victims came to replace the plucked, newcrowds of cowherders rode in from the long trails to the south, relaysof them galloped night after night from the far ranches stretching alongthe sandy Arkansas. There was no want of grain to sow in the gapingfurrows struck out by the hands of sin in the raw, treeless, unpaintedcity of Ascalon.

  And into all this fever of coming and going, this heartbreak of shameand loss, of quickly drawn weapon, of flash, despairing cry, anddeath--this sowing of recklessness and harvesting of despair--into allthis had come Calvin Morgan, a man with a clean heart, a clean purposein his soul.

  Ascalon once had been illuminated at night about the public square bykerosene lamps set on posts, after the manner of gas lights in a city,but the expense of supplying glass day after day to repair the damagedone by roysterers during the night had become so heavy that the townhad abandoned lights long before Morgan's advent there. Only the postsstood now, scarred by bullets, gnawed by horses which had stood hitchedto them forgotten by their owners who reveled their wages in Ascalon'sbeguiling fires. At the time of Morgan's coming, starlight andmoonlight, and such beams as fell through the windows of houses upon theuneven sidewalk around the square, provided all the illumination thatbrightened the streets of Ascalon by night.

  On the evening of his mildly adventurous first day in the town, Morgansat in front of the Elkhorn hotel, his chair in the gutter, according tothe custom, his feet braced comfortably against the outer edge of thesidewalk, flanked by other guests and citizens who filled the remainingseats. Little was said to him of his encounter with the new citymarshal, and that little Morgan made less, and brought to short endingby his refusal to be led into the matter at all. And as he sat there,chatting in desultory way, the fretting wind died to a breath, the lineof men in the chairs grew indistinct in the gloom of early night, andAscalon rose up like a sleeping wolf, shaking off the drowse of the day,and sat on its haunches to howl.

  This awakening began with the sound of fiddles and pianos in the bigdance hall whose roof covered all the vices which thrive best in thedark. Later a trombone and cornet joined the original musical din,lifting their brassy notes on the vexed night air. Bands of horsemencame galloping in, yelping the short, coyote cries of the cattle lands.Sometimes one of them let off his pistol as he wheeled his horse up tothe hitching rack, the relief of a simple mind that had no otherexpression for its momentary exuberance.

  Sidewalks became thronged with people tramping the little round of thetown's diversions, but of different stamp from those who had sparselytrickled through its sunlight on legitimate business that afternoon.Cowboys hobbled by in their peggy, high-heeled gait, as clumsy afoot aspenguins; men in white shirts without coats, their skin too tender towithstand the sun, walked with superior aloofness among the sheep whichhad come to their shearing pens, pr
eoccupied in manner, yet alert,watching, watching, on every hand.

  Now and then women passed, but they, also, were of the night, gaudilybedecked in tinsel and glittering finery that would have been fustian byday to the least discriminating eye. Respectability was not abroad inAscalon by night. With the last gleam of day it left the stage towantonness.

  As the activity of the growing night increased, high-pitched voices ofcowboys who called figures of the dances quavered above the confusion ofsounds, a melancholy note in the long-drawn syllables that seemed alament for the waste of youth, and a prophecy of desolation. When themusic fell to momentary silence the clash of pool balls sounded, and thetramp of feet, and quavering wild feminine laughter rising sharply,trailing away to distance as if the revelers sailed by on the storm oftheir flaming passions, to land by and by on the shores of morning,draggled, dry-lipped, perhaps with a heartache for the far places leftbehind forever.

  Morgan was not moved by a curiosity great enough to impel him to makethe round. All this he had seen before, time over, in the frontier townsof Nebraska, with less noise and open display, certainly, for here inAscalon viciousness had a nation-wide notoriety to maintain, and mustintensify all that it touched. He was wondering how the townspeople whohad honest business in life managed to sleep through that rioting, withthe added chance of some fool cowboy sending a bullet through their thinwalls as he galloped away to his distant camp, when Tom Conboy camethrough the sidewalk stream to sit beside him in a gutter chair.

  The proprietor of the Elkhorn hotel appeared to be under a depression ofspirits. He answered those who addressed him in short words, with mannerwithdrawn. Morgan noted that the diamond stud was gone out of the desertof Conboy's shirt bosom, and that he was belted with a pistol. Presentlythe man on Conboy's other hand, who had been trying with little resultto draw him into a conversation, got up and made his way toward thebright front of the dance hall. Conboy touched Morgan's knee.

  "Come into the office, kind of like it happened, a little while afterme," he said, speaking in low voice behind his hand. He rose, stretchingand yawning as if to give his movements a casual appearance, stood alittle while on the edge of the sidewalk, went into the hotel. Morganfollowed him in a few minutes, to find him apparently busy with hisaccounts behind the desk.

  A little while the proprietor worked on his bookkeeping, Morgan loungingidly before the cigar case.

  "Some fellers up the street lookin' for you," Conboy said, not turninghis head.

  "What fellows? What do they want?"

  "That bunch of cowboys from the Chisholm Trail."

  "I don't know them," said Morgan, not yet getting the drift of whatConboy evidently meant as a warning.

  "They're friends of the city marshal; he belonged to the same outfit,"Conboy explained, ostensibly setting down figures in his book.

  "Thank you," said Morgan, starting for the door.

  "Where you goin' to?" Conboy demanded, forgetting caution and possiblecomplications in his haste to interpose.

  "To find out what they want."

  "There's no sense in a man runnin' his arm down a lion's throat to seeif he's hungry," Conboy said, making a feint now of moving the cigarboxes around in the case.

  "This town isn't so big that they'd miss a man if they went out to hunthim. Where are they?"

  "I left them at Peden's, the big dance hall up the street. Ain't you gota gun?"

  "No," Morgan returned thoughtfully, as if he had not even considered onebefore.

  "The best thing you can do is to take a walk out into the country andforget your way back, kid. Them fellers are goin' to be jangled up justabout right for anything in an hour or so more. I'd advise you togo--I'll send your grip to you wherever you say."

  "You're very kind. How many of them are there?"

  "Seven besides Craddock, the rest of them went to Kansas City with thecattle you saw leave in them three extras this evening. Craddock'scelebratin' his new job, he's leadin' 'em around throwin' everythingwide open to 'em without a cent to pay. 'Charge it to me' he said toPeden--I was there when they came in--'charge it to me, I'm payin' thisbill.' You know what that means."

  "I suppose it means that the collection will be deferred," Morgon said,grinning over the city marshal's easy cut to generosity.

  "Indefinitely postponed," said Conboy, gloomily. "I'm goin' to put allmy good cigars in the safe, and do it right now."

  "Here's something you may put in the safe for me, too," said Morgan,handing over his pocketbook.

  "Ain't you goin' to leave town?" Conboy asked, hand stayed hesitantly totake the purse.

  "I've got an appointment with Judge Thayer to look at a piece of land inthe morning," Morgan returned.

  "Well, keep out enough to buy a gun, two of 'em if you're adouble-handed man," Conboy counseled.

  "I've got what I need," said Morgan, putting the purse in Conboy's hand.

  "I'd say for you to take a walk out to Judge Thayer's and stay all nightwith him, but them fellers will be around here a couple of weeks, Iexpect--till the rest of the outfit comes back for their horses. Justone night away wouldn't do you any good."

  "I couldn't think of it," said Morgan, coldly.

  "You know your business, I guess," Conboy yielded, doubtfully, "butdon't play your luck too far. You made a good grab when you took thatfeller's gun away from him, but you can't grab eight guns."

  "You're right," Morgan agreed.

  "If you're a reasonable man, you'll hit the grit out of this burg,"Conboy urged.

  "You said they were at Peden's?"

  "First dance house you come to, the biggest one in town. You don't needto tip it off that I said anything. No niggers in Ireland, you know."

  "Not a nigger," said Morgan.

  As he stepped into the street, Morgan had no thought of going in anydirection save that which would bring him in conjunction with the menwho sought him. If he began to run at that stage of his experiences, hereasoned, he would better make a streak of it that would take him out ofthe country as fast as his feet would carry him. If those riders of theChisholm Trail were going to be there a week or two, he could not dodgethem, and it might be that by facing them unexpectedly and talking itover man to man before they got too far along in their spree, thegrievance they held against him on Seth Craddock's account could beadjusted.

  He had come to Ascalon in the belief that he could succeed and prosperin that land which had lured and beckoned, discouraged and broken anddriven forth again ten thousand men. Already there was somebody in itwho had looked for a moment into his soul and called it courageous, andpassed on her way again, he knew not whither. But if Ascalon was sosmall that a man whom men sought could not hide in it, the countryaround it was not vast enough to swallow one whom his heart desired tofind again.

  He would find her; that he had determined hours ago. That should be hisfirst and greatest purpose in this country now. No man, or band of men,that ever rode the Chisholm Trail could set his face away from it. Hewent on to meet them, his dream before him, the wild sound of Ascalon'sobscene revelry in his ears.